A pair of city kids buy into the country life.

Gardening

07/01/2013

The way our garden is growing right now is not unlike watching a magic show.

A Brandywine plant with nary a single fruit at night will burst forth half a dozen marble sized tomatoes by morning. A zucchini squash will go from being the size of a KitKat bar to fully grown in the space of 48 hours. And watermelon vines? Those monsters will grow three inches overnight - we measured.

All this insane growth seems impossible to me because, not only am I incredibly new to gardening, I'm also living in a place with really optimal growing conditions. Bear Creek provides a perfect combination of hot days and temperate nights, occasional drenching rains, and plenty of room for everything to spread out roots.

That's not to say we haven't had our failures. Our asparagus failed to take root, despite hours of backbreaking trench digging and soil amending. Cucumbers seem determined to wither and die, no matter where they're planted, and how tenderly we care for them. And about half our onions -- the yellow ones, mostly, either got nibbled at by gophers, or started to mold before they were ever pulled. (The red ones, as you can see below, thrived beautifully.)